I am a bad reader. When I find myself at the end of a passage having daydreamed through the last three paragraphs, instead of reading them over, I just keep trucking on. Usually that's because the book is dribbling on about a white guy who feels bad about something. But I review books for a living (read: unpaid internship), so this is downright bad practice.
My choices, as I see them, are this: find more interesting books or find a book that is just as digressive as my own wandering mind. Considering most books these days are about some sad sack who moves to some forsaken place where he will inevitably be confronted with some terrible secret from his past, I had to rule out interesting books from my list of possible solutions. Instead, I set out to find books that I could daydream through while still getting the gist of. That's not to say I went with schlocky future-war fantasies or memoirs about sexual indiscretions I can have myself on any given night of the week. Literature, with a capital L, can still exist for the daydreamy and distracted minds of sad-sack white guys like myself.
It's a literature of—and about—digression. Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Truth About Marie takes this concept literally by allowing its own narrative to digress. It's not perfect: It's about a guy who's presumably white and who feels sorry for himself, and it begins (no joke) with a sexual indiscretion. But it quickly veers from these dangerous waters of plot-driven hokeyness when, in the first few pages, one of the main characters suffers an unexplained and painfully slow death just after halfheartedly sleeping with this Marie person.
This novel, which ultimately took me about three bus rides and a slow day at work to finish, is the third in a loose trilogy that takes place in, or around, Marie's world. They're not connected like episodes of Lost, but not entirely disjointed like a season of Saved by the Bell, either. But I digress. The point is, after a sudden death, most literature would diverge into a whirlwind of plot points that will be neatly and predictably tied together at the end. Instead, Toussaint allows his narrative to digress from this moment through a meandering 160 pages that include one particularly long flashback about an escaped racehorse. It makes every plot-driven, scene-setting novel seem a bit trite. Whatever truth about Marie the title refers to is quickly forsaken for an organic digression that reflects more on a distracted world than a carefully plotted, and thus unrealistic, novel.
Argentinian Sergio Chejfec, like the French Toussaint, has managed to gather endless literary awards and press concluding he's his continent's resident genius. I don't know about genius, but his novel My Two Worlds, which is dangerously close to being a novella, has successfully achieved a philosophical and multipurpose narrative while still gratifying short attention spans. And it's not just because it's short; this novel took me considerably longer to read than Toussaint's. It's 103 pages, but it's dense as hell, packed with long, sweeping sentences and nuanced meaning.
Take this humdinger:
The streets drawn on the map showed routes that were not only impossible, but also unverifiable; on the other hand, the spatial organization of the area could hardly be wrong; it was, at most, approximate, which was, in any case, advantageous, and would save me from needlessly lengthening my journey.
If this all sounds like psychobabble bullshit, that's because in any other narrative it would be. But Chejfec left out unnecessary backstory that would muddle up the words and put them on a shoddily built pedestal of writerly self-satisfaction.
Instead, all Chejfec has given us is context: Our narrator is an older gentleman who's arrived in a city in which he's never been, and when he finds himself in these situations, the first thing he does is go on long walks. So we follow the narrator on this walk as he expounds on the nature of walks: What does it mean to walk? Where can we really go within a city that we've never seen before? Does walking still have the same appeal it had in the past? Did it ever have appeal? Much like our narrator's walk, the story unfolds in a slow-going, meandering progression and, as his musings on spatial relationships digress, our minds are invited to as well. No preconceived climax with an expedited denouement. Not even chapters. Some would call this needlessly spare or self-congratulating experimentation. They're probably right. But I'd rather get lost in my own dumb head than in their preferred Hollywood-worthy plots. 
